


Constellatus

by inkystars



Category: Glee
Genre: End of the World, Existential Crisis, Forced Biological Transformation, Kidnapping, M/M, idk it's pretty tame compared to some other ones
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-15 23:17:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1322935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkystars/pseuds/inkystars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t know where he is, when he is, or how he got here. All he knows is his name: Kurt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Prologue

“Where did you even find this one?”

“Lying by the side of the road, half in the gutter. Not even sure if he’ll survive the injection.”

“At least we could find a male who couldn’t resist.”

“True. And from the looks of it, he’ll either be presumed dead with likely cause, or counted as a runaway. Either way--”

“It won’t point back to us. Exactly.”

“You know, this one’s kind of pretty--”

“Don’t even.”

“I’m just saying, wouldn’t it be fun if we, well, had some fun with him first?”

“He’s already in shitty enough conditions, do you want to have to reconfigure the calculations for that?”

“You’re such a killjoy.” 

“Says the one who’s basically proposing we do more work.”

“Shut up, like you weren’t--did he just move?”

“Well, if he did, it doesn’t matter, this’ll put him right out. And...there we go. Shhh, easy now. Don’t worry, this’ll take you to the stars...”

***

It was like a sudden inhalation of ash and dust, but his mouth popped open and foreign air entered his lungs, a deep breath that caused his entire body to jolt like electricity and burn like wildfire. He was running out of breath yet all he was doing was breathing in, panicking, his chest starting to arch off of whatever it was he was lying on, but he still couldn’t seem to get enough air--

There was more to breathing than that. His mind came into startlingly clear focus around that fact as his lungs breathed out suddenly, then gasping back in, and out and in and out. His eyes had opened at some point and he looked around every which way, lids blinking rapidly. Everything was too bright and he couldn’t see, so he shut his eyes and concentrated on waking up.

That’s what it was called, wasn’t it? Waking up. He was sure of that. And he was a he, he remembered that much as well. But who was he?

He panicked, trying to remember something, anything, words buzzing around his head, but they didn’t seem to make any sense. And he was...cold. He was very cold. And he couldn’t move. 

His eyes opened again, adjusting better as he took in his surroundings. He was in...some kind of room? It had to be a room, though it seemed fairly large and he couldn’t see all of it. 

His breath started to calm and his tongue poked out between his lips to lick them lightly, sluggishly. He felt very sluggish and weighty. And his hair was brushing his forehead. He had hair. 

Glancing around the room, he observed that he was on some sort of platform. There were pipes and bottles and odd lights all around him, most of which did not make any sense. And he didn’t seem to be wearing any clothing either. 

He closed his eyes again, trying to remember how he got here and where here was and where _he_ was from and _who_ he was. 

But there was nothing.

***

He opened his eyes and he was floating. 

Everything was a sharp bright blue that hurt his eyes--or maybe it was whatever was pressing against his eyeballs. 

Was it jelly? It felt like jelly?

Was jelly supposed to be blue?

Was he _inhaling_ jelly?

His hands reached up and nudged against something hard. He was in a tank of some sort, floating in blue jelly.

He could move his hand. He hadn’t been able to move before. 

Two of his left toes wiggled.

Something stepped in front of his tank and he saw large green eyes.

The jelly went black.

***

He opened his eyes and all he saw were wires. 

He remembered this though. It had been happening for a long time. How long, he had no way to gauge. But the machine kept moving with his body strapped into it, forcing his limbs to work. He would pass out but it wouldn’t matter because it would keep going until he woke up.

Though he wasn’t sure why he called it a machine. It was nothing like any sort of machine that he could barely recall at the fringes of his memory. And he was wired into it as much as any piece of metal.

Except he didn’t think it was made of metal.

He didn’t know what the material was. 

***

His eyes opened to look at everyone... _everything_ surrounding him. He’d only closed them briefly to stave off the panic. 

He was in a long line. Around him were things that were not like him, but he did not know what he was. Nothing looked the same. They were all different. 

They had all been given injections. His had stung and hurt. It had gone into the side of his neck. He could feel it shooting through his veins and into the edges of his mind. All the garbled noises that he’d been hearing started to make sense in his mind. He could understand it. One of the voices was telling him to take off his breather. 

He took the apparatus off of his mouth and took in a breath. For the first time, it didn’t feel like something was clogging his throat with ash or dust or jelly. It burned for a second before evening out. He became addicted. It was such a simple act--breathing. And yet he felt like he’d never breathed before properly in his life.

How long was his life?

They were being divided. Something about...currency? Who would bring more? He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to bring in a form of currency when he clearly had nothing. He didn’t have anything. 

He didn’t even have a sense of self. 

But apparently they were giving that out now. Titles. Places to go. Designations. He listened faintly along, blinking slowly. One came up to him. Turned his chin to look at his neck. Told him he was going to some place called Nyx. And he was to be called Sel-Enn. 

He was then moved past, and he realized three things.

He was from Earth.

He was human.

And his name was Kurt. 

 


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter 1 

Kurt’s room is small, but he doesn’t have to share it, which he wasn’t quite expecting. He lies on his weird gelatinous blanket-thing on the floor, staring at the dark wall inches from his nose.

He was freezing.

Nyx had two suns, one a searing red and the other a deep blue. The were further away than the sun Kurt was used to, but their duality warmed the planet to nearly the same temperature.

Nearly.

Binary star systems could be tricky. 

He wasn’t sure if binary star systems were something that he’d known from before or if it had been added to his brain with the injection.

Kurt curled up tighter, wrapping his arms around himself as he waited for the day to come, the next day. He’d been brought to the palace (there was another word for it in Nyxian, but the serum that altered his neurological pathways split translation halfway between learning new words and recognizing them and halfway between his brain just automatically switching them into English) to serve because some sort of festival or something or other as he understood it, surrounding one of the palace residents. 

He rolled over, rubbing his toes together. It had been somewhere around several days since the realization of his name, but not a whole lot more had sifted through. Just sort of impressions. Kurt. Human. Earth. Grass. Swimming pool. Bicycle. Warm sun. Icy slush. Music. Laughter. English. French. History.

Everything seemed distant, though. Far off. Like a half-forgotten dream from his childhood.

***

He was being tested, that much he could gather.

There were a series of tasks that he had to complete and his aptitude in each was being measured. Just like standardized tests all over again.

He blinked at that, the vague memory of scratching in answers and filling in bubbles with a pencil. Number two pencil--pens were not allowed. 

It was a mixed group that he was a part of. A few he recognized from before, but most were Nyxites. They were...somewhat human. At least in shape. But they were tall. The very shortest he’d seen was six foot and the Nyxite had seemed to be whatever corresponded to a human preteen girl. Others could hit nine or ten feet.

They had tails too. His mind shoved the adjective prehensile forward, and he blinked, unable to remember if it was his own. Their spines weren’t entirely right either and poked from their backs and metallic-looking scales seemed to be another feature. 

But it was their eyes that most deeply unsettled him. They had _depth_ in a way that he wasn’t entirely sure that eyes were supposed to have. Like mini voids hovering.

Oh, and there were three of them, one higher than the others, closer to the odd metal horn-things that poked out of the tops of their heads.

_“If seeing the void once is the devil, and twice is God, then what does seeing the void thrice mean?”_

Kurt shut his eyes, trying to keep the confusing voices out of his head.

***

One of the tests seemed to be a sort of Nyxian history recall, which he obviously failed spectacularly at. In memories that weren’t his, he knew the basics--Nyxians came from the metal of the ground, there was a brutal stage of cutting off bits of their exoskeletons before it became fashionable to leave them as is (thus the protruding spines and horns and scales), they participated in an elected monarchy with the Anax at the head of the planet, the entire planet was connected through that hierarchy, etc,--but he was not up-to-date on various cultural facts that everyone else seemed to know.

He also failed spectacularly at any type of strength or agility related activity, due to his size. But he also had the nagging feeling that he was somehow stronger or faster than he had been before.

Whenever or wherever that was. 

Another thing that disconcerted him were the...names.

Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. 

Every being he was tested with had some form of name or other, most of which he could pronounce (hell, he couldn’t pronounce his own given name with the correct inflections). But beyond that, and the other workers at the palace, no one had names. They had positions. They had titles.

And there was one title in particular that Kurt heard at least three hundred times a day.

_Pouli_.

***

For the time being, he was a runner--going from room to room and delivering various items before quickly disappearing from sight. Like a mail boy of sorts. 

The disappearing part was easy. No one seemed to pay him much mind. Everyone seemed focused on the festival that was coming up--something about a union of sorts? And one title was continually uttered--Pouli. 

Kurt’s duties were brief and he took his time walking back to his quarters to wait for his nutrition shot--as he was unable to eat any Nyxian food. 

The hallways were large, at least fifty feet high in some of the lowest areas. He figured that it only in part had to do with ornamentation and a bit more to do with the fact that Nyxites had a tendency to climb extraordinary heights with the use of their tails--which, on his first day, he learned to stay away from. They were frightfully sharp and left some pretty nasty cuts. 

The palace seemed to be made of an odd liquidy black material that didn’t seem to be either stone or metal and it had the vaguest sense that it was constantly in movement. multitudes of amber lanterns lit the entire structure, and there were no windows.

Kurt had searched high and low, but he was afforded no view to the outside world. 

Sometimes if he looked up high enough, he could see brief flickers of light that weren’t black or amber, but there was no way he could climb that high, especially without use of a tail or possessing the ability to jump up ten feet at a moment’s notice.

The palace was labyrinthine in its build, growing steadily more complicated and maze-like the closer to the center you came, almost like a solar system. He primarily dealt with deliveries to the outer rings, biding his time until his qualifications were to be properly assessed so he would gain a title to pair with his name and, hopefully, one day he would be able to shed his name for good and become that title. 

Kurt was fine with shedding Sel-Enn eventually. He would keep Kurt to himself. 

He paused suddenly, blinking as he turned to look at the wall that his fingers had been absentmindedly trailing against. The swirling upon them ceased. Cautiously, he kept walking, trailing his fingers gently, and their heat caused the texture of the wall to move and undulate, almost forming a picture. He blinked, a smile tugging at his lips in delight as he pressed his palm against the wall, pulling it back to look at the sudden colors underneath--

A hand grabbed his shoulder suddenly and he found himself pulled sharply back from the wall. “What do you think you’re doing?”

There were two guards, signified by their dark grey helmets and staffs. 

Kurt scrambled for an excuse. “I was just--”

“The named aren’t allowed to touch the walls.”

“It’s a felony.”

Kurt stared. “But I didn’t know, that’s not--”

He found himself on the ground when one of the staffs swung out of nowhere and hit him in the face. “The unnamed are not allowed to address our station.” 

Blood dripped out of his nose onto the ground, shining an odd metallic lavender for a second before transitioning to dark red. It managed to briefly distract him before rage shot through his system, hot and messy.

He was back on his feet, yelling in a mixed garble of Nyxite and--oddly enough--French. “Well shit, then how the hell am I supposed to communicate and learn if I can’t speak to you and you just hit me whenever I make a mistake, you _neander_ \--”

A hand reached out to grab the other’s staff as it arced down towards his face again.

Kurt jumped, looking to the side to see a third guard, in armor that was all black, holding the other’s staff. 

“I’ll deal with this one.”

The other two stiffened immediately, but Kurt saw them exchange odd half-smiles to one another as the third guard turned, walking down the hall and Kurt was forced to follow. 

They went a different route than he was used to and he found himself getting dizzier and dizzier as they folded across various onyx black halls. 

Without warning, the guard grabbed Kurt around the waist, hoisting him in one arm like a duffle bag (which wasn’t hard, seeing as he was well over ten feet tall), causing Kurt to squawk indignantly as the guard jumped suddenly, swinging out his tail to catch a ledge and sliding them both smoothly into an entrance. 

It was a room of some sort and Kurt was quite unceremoniously placed on a sort of floating hammock as the guard turned away, slowly shedding his armor. 

“What’s your name?”

The sudden volume surprised Kurt and he almost flailed out of the hammock. “Um, Sel-Enn.”

“Still an uninitiated, right?”

Kurt nodded, head tilted to the side slightly as he watched the guard. Under the helmet were three black eyes that sparked mischievously, and two little gray horn nubs at his hairline. His hair was black and kept short and neat, and there were dark gray and silver scales around his temples and sides of his face that went back and gathered at the nape of his neck. More clothing was shed until he stood only in the odd pant-like articles of clothing that most seemed to wear (Kurt was stuck with his weird tunic for the time being until he got a title) and two dark gray metal cuffs around his wrists that all guards wore. 

His back was to Kurt, so the large silver spikes of his spine were on display, protruding from his back like some sort of reptilian dinosaur alien man...creature...thing. Countless silver and dark gray and black scales clustered around his spine, taking root at the bottom where his spine turned into a tail, that was currently poking out of his pants and ruffling his hair.

Kurt couldn’t really help but stare. It was the most he’d ever seen of a Nyxite out of dress.

The guard turned back to him, a mess of tattoos (or maybe not? The could be genetic...) across his chest as he smiled at Kurt. “You’re a refugee, right?”

Kurt started before nodding. 

The guard lit a few white orbs, tossing them in the air before he grabbed a large pillow-like cushion with his tail and placed it at Kurt’s feet before collapsing onto it. “Well, that’s pretty obvious, given your stature. I’d offer you something to drink, but...” His eyes glanced at the side of Kurt’s neck, where a network of pastel veins met in a cluster for where he always got his nutrition shots. 

“It’s fine,” Kurt said. “So, what happens now?”

“Now, you relax,” the guard said, grabbing a box of some sort of food off of a small table and popping a few small cerulean spheres into his mouth, crunching noisily. “While I tell you the ground rules. Number one--don’t break any rules in front of most of the guards. They’re sticklers for rules. Well, they’re mostly--” He said something in Nyxian that was extremely garbled and confusing and the translator in Kurt’s brain didn’t seem to recognize it, but he had a vague idea of what it meant. “Two--just don’t touch the architecture in general unless no one’s around. Do those two things and you should be fine. Oh, and steer clear of the Pouli as well, he can be a fright.” 

“Pouli?” Kurt frowned.

The guard stared. “Don’t tell me you don’t know who the Pouli is.”

“I...” Kurt shook his head. “I’ve heard mention of him, and something about a festival, but that’s it.”

The guard groaned. “The Pouli is our soon to be Anax--” Kurt’s mind supplied that it was the Nyxian equivalent to a king. “--we elected him before he was grown. Gods know why. Well, I suppose he wasn’t as bad back then, but he’s grown into a fright. Everyone’s been so focussed lately because the union festival is coming up, when he’ll take the throne and choose another star system for us to ally with during his reign.”

“Oh,” Kurt nodded, before frowning. “So that’s why extra help has been needed?”

The guard tossed a couple of more spheres back. “Exactly. And why the roles have been so hard to fill. Usually anyone can choose where they want to work, but due to the influx of help needed, everyone has to be assessed and placed where they’re best needed.”

“Okay,” Kurt said, processing everything. “Thank you for explaining. It’s been a big help.”

“Anytime,” the guard smiled. “You know, we head guards have been needing a new carrier.” 

Kurt’s eyebrows shot up. “You think I should ask for that?”

“Your opinion won’t be taken into account, you’re one of the named,” the guard shrugged. “But I could put in word for you.”

“Thank you,” Kurt said again. “Everything’s just been very confusing...”

“I can imagine,” the guard nodded. “It’s not easy here on the refugees. And to be honest, you should be fine wherever they put you.”

“Really?” 

“Well, granted, as long as you don’t end up assisting the Pouli. No way you'd last that.”

Kurt stared. "Why are you being so helpful?"  


The guard shrugged. "Well, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I find you appealing."

"Oh."

"Yeah. Also, well let's just say I know what it's like being from off-world. You must be terrified."

"Yeah..." Kurt echoed quietly. "Terrified..."

***

That night, he thought on it. 

He knew that he should be far more scared than he was. He knew that he wasn't in the right place or right time or with right people. He knew he was from Earth and was a different species and shouldn't be able to survive solely on nutrition injections and there shouldn't be a pastel vein conglomeration on his neck and his blood shouldn't flash metallic lilac. 

He should remember what year it is or at least what year it was or what was the name of his hometown or anything about family (wait, he did have a family, right?) or what food felt like on his tongue.

He pulled off his tunic and laid on his mat, breathing slowly as he looked down his body. It looked familiar, but it also looked different somehow and he wasn't quite sure why. 

Over his sternum was a pale line, and he traced it quietly, fingers trailing lightly across it because it didn't seem right. 

Why didn't it seem right? It wasn't a birthmark but it looked really old. Which meant it had to be a--

_ "Let me go!" _

_ "Grab his arms, come on!" _

_ The buttons from his suit jacket busted open as he tried to turn away, run back through the cornstalks, but he was too dizzy. _

_ "You call me a Lima loser?" _

_ "Get off--"   _

\--scar.

Kurt's hand shot away from his chest as a spike of genuine fear surged through him and his breath started coming up short and he turned over on his side, eyes wide as his heart began hammering in his chest.

There were other flits of sound and color--memories, his mind filled in--at the edges of his psyche, but he shut his eyes and pushed them away, ignoring, not feeling, not wanting to know.

Because no matter how confusing his being here was now, it seemed far preferable to knowing where he'd been.


End file.
